The Radical Midwest of Bill Sentner
St Louis organizer Bill Sentner led some of the most successful labor battles in Midwestern history by uniting workers across race and gender lines. He won a string of major victories against corporate giants — before McCarthyism put a target on his back.
As president of United Electrical Workers District 8, William Sentner address a crowd of union workers at a small arms plant. (Courtesy of the William Sentner Papers, Julian Edison Department of Special Collections, Washington University in St Louis)
In his files at Washington University, among Missouri’s Communist Party materials, William “Bill” Sentner kept a collection of St Louis labor history documents, including a newspaper clipping of a Mark Twain quote on the “undeniable right” of US citizens “to alter their form of government”:
My kind of loyalty is to my country, not to its institutions or its office holders. Institutions are extraneous — they are its mere clothing and clothing can wear out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body from winter, disease, death. . . .
The citizen who thinks he sees that the commonwealth’s political clothes are worn out, and yet holds his tongue and does not agitate for a new suit is disloyal; he is a traitor.
This passage may have been used in Sentner’s court proceedings — he was one of the American Communist Party leaders arrested and prosecuted under the Smith Act of 1940, which imposed wartime criminal penalties for publishing, advising, or teaching that it would be desirable to overthrow the US government “by force or violence.”
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